I'm just wondering how all the people on this forum came to making films. I remember very well when I shot little action movies with my brother and my neighbour in the backyard, equipped with our parent's old video camera and some plastic guns (It's actually not even that long ago ). And from there I somehow slipped into the "real" filmmaking world.

So what were your first encounters with a camera?
It would be very interesting to hear some good stories.

I made 4 movies in high school, all on digital video. They each got progressively longer and more complicated. The last one I did in my senior year was a Godfather spoof that was over 40 minutes long, in widescreen, and had an original cut and a director's cut with alternate actors and added scenes in the director's cut (I directed and I wanted my physics teacher to play the mob boss, but it was a project for my friend's class and he didn't want that teacher cast- so we wound up shooting it both ways!)

I used to play around a lot with a VHS camera to get out of having to take tests in highschool. But I was also lucky that my dad worked in film as well, so I would always be playing with cameras when no one was looking-- and even sneaking out some BetaSP tapes of little things I'd shoot.

I started off making movies on my dad's Hi8 camera in the mid-90s. I wanted more control over the picture than I could get from the linear, tape-to-tape editing systems of the time, so I finished most of them as 4-bit greyscale 320x256 animations at 15 frames per second on an Amiga, probably making me one of the earliest amateur users of nonlinear editing, if you can call appending animation files together in Deluxe Paint "editing". You could get a VLab Motion MJPEG board for an Amiga 4000 and cut something approaching broadcastable standard-def pictures, but the board, the host computer, and the storage were completely unaffordable to me at the time.

I suppose having moved on to 30-bit RGB 1920x1080 productions feels like progress.

Regrettably, all of those old Amiga animations are stored on an obscure Syquest data cartridge format that makes it very difficult to access them, and I don't have any way of doing so anymore.

I bought a Canon 514 super-8 camera in 1991 and shot a few rolls of Kodachrome 40. I was instantly in love. Btw, that's the only stock that was truly beautiful- I miss it dearly. Paul Simon didn't write a song about Fuji 100D did he?

Not really. I did a lot more writing as a kid (mostly stories invloving Transformers or G.I. Joe

The first video I put together was about the simliarities that my idol (who at that time was Martin Scorsese) and I shared. It was a cute kind of "documentary," if you will, which I actually intended to send to him but never did.

Not really. I did a lot more writing as a kid (mostly stories invloving Transformers or G.I. Joe

The first video I put together was about the simliarities that my idol (who at that time was Martin Scorsese) and I shared. It was a cute kind of "documentary," if you will, which I actually intended to send to him but never did.

I used my VHS camera and my dad's old Bell & Howell Super 8 camera. But I was the director and star of it, so I was never really behind the camera. So I guess that one wouldn't really count

I made a couple of little films on a VHS handycam when I was about 12 or 13, I had no way to edit anything though, so everything had to be shot in sequence (including the opening and closing credits written on A4 paper), "Indiana Will & the Walk Around the Block" was one of them I think

Then made some more extensive 15-20 minute films in high school, until my teacher told me I was being too ambitious and I gave up on my school's media department entirely.

Instead, from about 14 onwards I spent a lot more time shooting and processing B&W stills in my school's darkroom - our photography teacher let me just do my own thing, playing with different types of processing and even having me take groups of up to 5 other boys into the school's older (and substantially smaller darkroom) and teaching them myself. Those were good times.

I started shooting around the age of 13 when I bought a Hi8 camera from a garage sale to film skateboarding. At the time, all of my friends were drooling over the older skaters new VX1000's, DVX100's, with the Century Optics "Death Lens" (which is silly considering I just bought one on CL out of nostalgia for $50!). I filmed skating for years, until My freshman year of High School I took a TV Production Class. My teacher pushed us to try shooting narratives/commercials/music videos. Having my previous experience with shooting and editing made it an easy transition. I shot my own films with friends all throughout High School. Those years shaped me entirely, we had Tshirts made, and would promote our films using the early days of My Space.

The only tragedy is; looking back on some of the work I did back then, I feel I have become more focused on Standards then Creativity.

It started with a love for horror. When I was 19 my buddy and I were standing in line for a Bouncing Souls concert talking about the latest grotesque movie we had just watched. (We made it our business to critique everything like a set of Horror-Siskel & Ebert) For once, we were actually disagreeing on something so I looked at him and asked "Can you do better?" and therein began the filmmaking passion. We found a scriptwriting competition that granted the winner the making of their screenplay, sat down and powered through a story (knowing nothing about scripting). When nothing came of the competition we said "screw it" let's make stuff ourselves... and we did... We made our own horror movies. They didn't always go very well or come out the best, but they were fun and full of our own brand of weird. My genres have expanded, but horror is still my first love